A joint project has been set up between ONS and University College London to develop a new UK Output Area Classification, for which we are seeking your views and thoughts. The new Output Area Classification is planned to be created using 2011 Census data, when available, and is relevant to anyone interested in social area classifications, encompassing geodemographics and neighbourhood classifications.

Many OAC User Group members will be delighted to learn that not only has ONS coded its Wealth and Assets Survey with OAC, but there’s a paper “Exploring the geographical distribution of wealth using the output area classification” in the latest Economic & Labour Market Review (Jan 2011). http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/elmr/elmr-jan11.pdf – pages 59-78.

The 2010 Family Spending report is available here and presents a series of interesting OAC profiles.

“The supergroups with the highest expenditure are supergroups 2 (city living) and 4 (prospering suburbs), spending an average of £457.90 and £454.10 per week, respectively, followed by supergroup 3 (countryside), with expenditure of £433.70. Supergroup 5 (constrained by circumstances) showed the lowest expenditure at £269.20 followed by supergroup 1 (blue collar communities)….”

What is the OACoder Software?

The OAC classification has previously been disseminated by the ONS at the Output Area Level. For a lot of users this has been problematic given that address records typically consist of lists of unit postcodes. A recent development at the ONS has created an open licence version of the National Statistics Postcode Directory (NSPD), which usefully includes an OAC Code for each unit postcode in the UK. Researchers at University College London and University of Liverpool have created a free tool which uses this file and can read a CSV list of postcodes, and then append the corresponding OAC code for each of these addresses.

How do I get the Software?

The good news is that this tool is free to use – the only requirement being that you agree to the terms of a license as part of a short software request form. This is available here.

We have just finished compiling version 1.0 of the OAC grand index. This is a tool which we hope you will find useful in its current form, however, we will be adding more data in the future as and when this becomes available. For this first edition we would like to thank Daryl Lloyd – Department for Transport and Mike Hare - British Population Survey for their very generous contributions of data; and furthermore, Daniel Lewis and Singleton for compilation the spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet is available in Microsoft Excel format and available to download here.

What is a grand index?

A grand index is a simple spreadsheet of index scores for a series of variables cross tabulated with OAC Sub Groups, Groups and Super Groups. These index scores can be used to target specific OAC clusters in your profiling work. For example, you could ask which neighbourhoods in your local area are likely to contain users of social networking websites?

We at the OAC User Group feel that implementing a standard set of colours would help OAC. It would make it easier to share data visualisations, such as graphs and maps if the groups were directly comparable by colour, and would give OAC a branded feel, bringing it in line with other commercial classifications.

As such, we have tabulated a colour set that was designed by Martin Callingham, and is currently in use by the people at localfutures. We recommend you use it, although of course you are not required to.

The colour specifications, in RGB, HSV, Hex and CMYK are available in the attached excel file, inputting these values will allow you to visualise OAC in a uniform way. We will look to harmonise all our future releases in line with these colours.